Katrina Pierson Fires Back at New Omarosa Tape Featuring Her Audio “CBS Was Played”

Trump campaign senior advisor Katrina Pierson appeared on CNN tonight to respond at length to tape Omarosa Manigault Newmanreleased featuring her this morning.

CBS News this morning played the tape, which appears to show Pierson and other Trump campaign staffers talking about a rumored Trump “n-word tape.” Pierson denied on Fox News last night that there was a tape of this conversation in the first place.

After going over the Sarah Sanders flap from today’s press briefing, Erin Burnett played the tape for Pierson and asked Pierson what she meant when she said, “No, he said it. He is embarrassed.”

Pierson immediately said, “CBS was played by Omarosa today. Omarosa went around making a very specific claim that I had been refuting for the last two days. And then she took two different audios, submitted it to them where it was conflated into one story.”

She told Burnett the transcript backs her up, saying that the tape doesn’t include the “hours upon hours” of Manigault Newman herself regarding this alleged Trump tape. Pierson insisted she was just “placating” Manigault Newman.

WATCH:

Pierson told DailyMail.com in a statement early Tuesday afternoon that ‘it’s clear now’ that rumors of an ‘n-word’ tape ‘were always being circulated by Omarosa and her alone.’

‘In her secret tape recording of me, it was one of many times that I would placate Omarosa to move the discussion along because I was weary of her obsession over this alleged tape. To be clear, I never organized a conference call with Jason Miller to confirm Mr. Trump said anything,’ she claimed.

‘That discussion was nothing other than sifting through unconfirmed rumors regarding the Apprentice tape and the transcript supports my statement. Omarosa fabricated the story by conflating numerous discussions.’

Statement From Katrina Pierson regarding CBS Transcripts

These are the transcripts that CBS provided to me, not the pubic, of the edited audio clips that they aired of TWO conflated calls supporting Omarosa’s key claim (as well as several inaccurate media articles) that I had confirmed existence of a Trump tape where a derogatory word which I wholly deny.

During both calls, either Lynne or myself had to refer to Omarosa for affirmation of her intel during the discussions. What is taking place during call 1 is myself, Omarosa and Lynne Patton sifting through rumors clearly instigated by Omarosa herself because she was obsessed with discussing a purported tape and would not let the topic go unless we placated her fear mongering in. Since there is no way to formulate an actual response strategy to a purely hypothetical tape with no context, the end result was advising Jason Miller, call 2, to ask for our input if Omarosa’s insistence that a tape would imminently be released was accurate and a response was to be issued.

As Jason Miller says in the transcript “It’s kind of tough to go and draft something when you don’t even know what the context is,” which is obviously true since I clearly point that out in the transcript.

In addition, what is not included in the released transcript is the hours and hours of Omarosa obsessing, bullying and fear mongering about a rumored tape, insisting it must be real and that we take her “doom and gloom” seriously. We now suspect she had sabotage on her mind from the start and this was all part of an effort to coax people into saying what she needed to build her narrative for her book.

Finally, as I mentioned in multiple media appearances, the transcripts prove that Omarosa conflated 2 separate phone calls to deceive the public in her narrative. I did not say “he said it” in a conference call with Jason Miller and was never a source that confirmed Trump said a derogatory word.